Situating France: The Career of André Siegfried, 1900-40

It is now widely held that during the closing decades of the Third Republic, definitions of what it meant to be French became increasingly rigid. As Eugen Weber observes in The Hollow Years, by the 1930s denunciations of foreign immigrants were commingled with a resurgence of antisemitism and growing unease over American influence, powerfully foreshadowing the Vichy regime's racism.2 Stimulated by a desire to explore these linkages further, many historians have analyzed the development of exclusionary attitudes and policies during the years, even decades, preceding the onset of the National Revolution. Gerard Noiriel has summed up the scholarly agenda in the following terms: "I wanted to understand to what extent the republican past weighed upon Vichy's present, more often than not without the actors being aware of it."3